Vincent Hargaden, doctoral student in industrial and systems engineering (ISE), has received the prestigious IBM fellowship for 2010-2011 to pursue his research in supply chain management under the advisement of ISE Professor Jennifer Ryan. Hargaden’s research considers the problem of resource planning and workforce allocation in professional service organizations. The goal of his research is to develop a comprehensive workforce planning model for professional service organizations to enable these organizations to optimize the allocation of their skilled personnel to client projects and to provide strategic and practical insights into different workforce planning policies.

A team of students recently competed in the Mathematical Competition in Modeling. The MCM is a contest that lasts exactly four days (96 hours), in which teams of up to three people must create a mathematical model to answer a question proposed. Rensselaer’s four teams ranked highly, placing in the Outstanding (top five solutions), Finalist (top 1 percent), Meritorious (top 14 percent), and Honorable Mention (top 44 percent) tiers, collectively.

Ten members of RPISEC, Rensselaer’s computer security club, attended the 8th International Security Talent Search recently, hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Security Practices and Research Student Association. In the competition, each team of five operates a control center of five computers running a variety of operating systems and Internet services, intentionally configured by the organizers to be riddled with security flaws. Teams try to attack the other’ servers while defending their own. RPISEC’s Team Jacob, comprised of Shawn Denbow ’13, Wilson Wong ’13, Laura Babcock ’14, Aktarer Zaman ’14, and Colin Rice ’14, placed second overall in the competition. A second Rensselaer team, Team Edward  which included Ryan Govostes ’11, Adam Comella ’11, Andrew Zonenberg ’12, Young Liu ’13, and Joe LaBarbera ’13  placed fifth overall among the 14 participating teams.